More than 200 years ago, Captain James Cook called Australia "the continent of smoke". There's a truth there that we still haven't come to terms with. In the weekend's firestorms there's a price that has been paid, this time in human lives – dreadful personal tragedies that occur because the structure of society, of government, of planning law, of the economy, of agriculture are poorly adapted to the environment in which it has been planted.

It isn't just bushfires, although that's nature's greatest weapon of immediate destruction. Australia is a very difficult environment for human – and most other – life. The ancient soils are thin and worn out. There's very, very little water. And most of the vegetation, clinging to life, is dry and tough, stuffed with defensively repulsive chemicals, defending its hard-won life.

When I interviewed Tim Flannery, Australia's foremost science intellectual, some 20 years ago, he said then that he thought Australia had a carrying capacity for sustainable human life of perhaps 4 million. (The population is now 20 million.) Around the same time, I interviewed a distinguished agricultural scientist who said that inland Australia should get rid of all of the cattle and sheep and simply harvest free-ranging kangaroos. Not only are they are they far more drought-hardy and adapted for the environment, but their soft-pad feet wouldn't produce tracks that quickly become paths of rapid erosion, as ungulate hooves do.

The timing of those interviews reflects the fact that it is only in the past couple of decades that science has started to get to grips with understanding the nature of the Australian environment, in part because the management of the environment by Aboriginal communities before Europeans arrived started to be studied. (The term fire-stick farming – by which Aborigines maintained an open, and relatively safe environment with regular fires – was only invented in 1969, although no doubt similar terms occurred in dozens of now mostly lost Aboriginal languages.)

Science has started to understand – but society and the government certainly hasn't. I shuddered when I heard one of the burnt-out residents proclaiming on the BBC World Service that they'd certainly rebuild their home – the geography is clearly unsuitable. But of course we have an individualised, capitalist system of land ownership. That person is tied by that to one small block of land.

And we like huge, heavily structured and highly flammable homes – homes based on designs suited to the far different problems of Europe. There's no provision within societal or legal frameworks for a small bark humpy that could be replaced in a few hours, or even a caravan that could be hitched up and whipped away. (Planning law wouldn't allow that.)

And people like to live in the bush – or at least pretend they do, although a mall will be just down the road: extensive bushland suburbs are an Australian tradition. That means isolated homes surrounded by highly flammable bushland, spread across hundreds of hectares.

Victoria suffers particularly badly when it comes to the human toll from bushfires because it is, some of the time, quite wet, and growth can be luxuriant. As the dry times come, as they increasingly will as climate change takes effect on the globe's most vulnerable continent, it pays a heavy price.

Sign up for the Guardian Today

Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.